As you may know, the house use for the filming of TCM1974 is old as hell, it was built in 1909 by a Local Craftsman called Carl Carlson by the Thompson family, but the Blueprint used to make the house was not made originally by Carlson, it was actually made by an architect called George F. Barber.
(a Photo of George Franklin Barber.)
George was a successful architect who was well know for marketing his house designs in all 50 States of america through mail-order catalogs, with his wide reach and accessibility in the market, he was one of the most successful residential architects of the late victorian period in the United States.
the way his business worked was that he would have ads for the multiple catalogs he made during his time in Architecture magazines.
Then if you were interested in getting one of these Catalogs, you would send them a Order Sheet with the money to buy it, and then you would recieve the catalog in the mail.
After you selected your desired Design in the catalog, you would “probably” send them a letter specifying the Design you wanted along with the money for it, and after all of that you would recieve from them in the mail the blueprint to the design along with the material list, there arent any surviving specimens of the Blueprints and list of materials, i presume it was because they were deemed unecessary once the project was finished, and were thrown away by the contractors who built them.
One of the many Catalogs that George F. Barber made during his career was New Model Dwellings and How Best To Build Them (1894), and in this exact catalog, there is a home design that is strikingly similar to the Family house from TCM1974.
(Photo of the Family House for reference)
there are clear diferences between the House from the movie and the one from the catalog, but by combining aspects of Plan no. 1 and no. 2 available in the page for design #18, you can get a pretty similar result to the movie one, so my theory is that when the Thompson family first started planning to build their house on their property at Quick Hill, they saw an ad from George F. Barber for his “New Model Dwellings” catalog and bought it, then they most likely when over the catalog along with Carl Carlson, and landed on Design 18.
(my best recreation of the blueprint of the Movie Family House.)
after finding that design, the Thompsons most likely asked Carlson to make a brand new Blueprint using the aspects of Plan no. 1 and no. 2 that they found interesting, and so thats how the Blueprint of the Family House from the movie was probably made.
“New Model Dwellings and How Best To Build Them (1894) By George F. Barber” is now available in High Resolution at my Internet Archive Page, so if you want to downloa it, go crazy!
